Come Love the Waters: Dreams for a Poisoned River (Remediation of the lower Hackensack River)
This studio is concerned with creating and supporting life-affirming dreams of human-nonhuman intimacy and connection, dreams that glimmer with love and generosity, and breathe life into landscapes that have long known death. Through a process of research, field work, and multi-sensory design experimentation and iteration, we will imagine vessels for engaging cultural, emotional, spiritual, and physical healing at the large-scale (reaching the many, not the few) in the process of material remediation of polluted sites.
Our starting point is the upcoming remediation process of the lower Hackensack River. In 2022, the lower 22 river miles of the river received EPA Superfund designation, following centuries of industrial practices that have resulted in sediments and food webs laden with toxins. The centuries of pollution and the domination of infrastructure and private industrial properties along the river bank have created a scenario in which surrounding communities are largely disconnected from the river. Myriad health issues plague some of these communities due to their long-term proximity to polluting industry. Although some people do fish in the water, serious health risks come along with eating the river’s wildlife. The process of remediation, led by the EPA, is just beginning and, if successful, will take decades. This process is primarily focused on the literal removal of toxins from the river in collaboration with the entities responsible for the pollution.
We seek to create vessels, stages, and scaffolds that facilitate the unfolding of new entanglements of human and non-human riverine relationship. We aim to move far beyond typical ideas of “recreation.” Instead, we dive deeply into what constitutes the space of encounter, dreaming into the sensorial, emotional, spiritual, and physical. We explore scales of encounter, from the individual to the collective, hoping to uncover propositions that have the power to move culture at the level of the mainstream.
